Democratic Party

Home Page

Reference

"The Democratic Party is one of two major political parties in the United States, the other being the Republican Party. The party traces its beginnings to Thomas Jefferson in the early 1790s, and is one of the two longest-standing political parties in the world (the only one older being the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom). ..."

Articles

"The great advantage of the Jeffersonian Democrat project, however, more than outweighs the negatives. The Democratic Party is out of ideas: ideologically, their leaders and 'theoreticians' are remarkably barren. ... These people need to be educated, and, what's more, many of them are educating themselves: Moulitsas' essay proves that. ... All hail the Jeffersonian Democrats — and let the Democratic reformation begin!"

"Born in the agrarian era of its founder, Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic Party's original story was of a small central government serving self-sufficient 'little people' ..., prizing and preserving individual liberty -- juxtaposed against the elitist federalists, and their monarchical, big central government ambition."

"For now, suffice it to say that party elites among the Democrats regard regular Americans as the problem and not the solution, so it is no surprise that they continue to have problems finding candidates for whom people are willing to vote. ... Let us remember that the core problem, in the end, is ideological and not personal. Uproot the underlying anti-liberal assumptions of the Democrats, make them Jeffersonian once again, and you would have a viable party."

"... nothing would be better if we could hand the job over to the newly installed Democratic Congress and relax as they extricate us from the Iraqi quagmire. Yet that clearly is not happening: instead, the Democrats, content with purely symbolic measures, are abstaining when it comes to Iraq ..."

"If the Democrats are to make a real difference, their first task is to repeal the Orwellian-named 'Patriot Acts,' the torture legislation, the detention without court evidence legislation, and the right-to-spy and invade privacy without court warrant legislation. ... Can Democrats restore American liberties and leadership, or will a lust for power corrupt them, too, and cause Democrats to retain the police state powers Bush has created?"

"When the American people caught on that the 'war on terror' was a cloak for wars of aggression, they put Democrats in control of Congress in order to apply a brake to the regime's warmongering. However, the Democrats have proven to be impotent to stop the neoconservative drive to wider war and, perhaps, world conflagration."

Give Me Liberty, by Rose Wilder Lane, 1936
Originally published as an article titled "Credo" in the Saturday Evening Post; describes her experiences in and history of Soviet Russia and Europe, contrasting them with the history of the United States, emphasizing the individualist themes

"In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism."

Impeach the American People!, by Butler Shaffer, 17 Nov 2006
Comments on proposals to bring George W. Bush and others in his administration to "justice", observing that most Americans went into a "moral slumber" that allowed the former to "turn America into the 21st century equivalent of 1939 Germany"

"[Most Democrats] throughout these past five years, have done little more than opportunistically await the day that they might recover the White House in order to continue the same statist agenda 'under new management.' You will not find the Democrats proposing repeal of the Patriot Act — or any of the other recently enacted additions to police-state powers — or the dismantling of the Homeland Security system."

"Although the Democracy would stray in significant and reprehensible ways from the principled course he had charted, his imprint still left an enduring legacy. The Democratic Party remained the political alliance with the strongest affinity for laissez-faire, personal liberty, and free trade until almost the turn of the century."

The New Deal Made Them 'Right', by Damon W. Root, Cato Policy Report, Sep 2009
Discusses how various "prominent liberals" (Mencken, John T. Flynn, Al Smith, Burton K. Wheeler and Nock) found themselves categorized on the political right as a consequence of their opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal

"That collision came on January 25, 1936, when [Al] Smith delivered a fiery anti–New Deal speech before the Liberty League, a mostly conservative group organized in opposition to Roosevelt's policies. ... Deriding FDR and his brain trust for their 'betrayal' of the Democratic party's principles, Smith declared: 'It is all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Norman Thomas or Karl Marx, or Lenin, or any of the rest of that bunch, but what I won't stand for is to let them march under the banner of Jefferson, Jackson, or Cleveland.' Unfortunately for Smith, most Democrats saw things differently."

"The moment House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to strip out a provision in her omnibus 'antiwar' bill that would have required the President to come to Congress before attacking Iran, the Iranian chapter of this long and bloody saga was semi-officially opened. ... Isn't that just like the Democrats: they come out against the Iraq war only when it's too late – and even as they signal the adminstration to go ahead with the next war."

"In the voters' view, they had only one group to turn to: the Democrats. But even if this was largely a negative vote, it doesn't mean people won't warm to Democrats' activist agenda. Americans, sad to say, are not opposed in principle to activist government. ... Why shouldn't they applaud the Democrats when the new majority begins promising expanded middle-class entitlements?"

".. this is not to say that the Democrats are any better. Their political cowardice and fear of being called 'terrorist-loving cowards who hate America' has dissuaded them from opposing consolidation of federal power by the Republicans. But while Republicans and Democrats share the same big-spending, big-government philosophy ... Democrats make no bones about being advocates of big spending and big government ..."

"A conservative is someone who wants to keep things pretty much as they are, dubbing any major shift in direction a 'risky scheme.' By that definition, who in Washington today are more conservative than the so-called liberal Democrats, yapping like protective bitches, should anyone approach their overgrown brood of social welfare programs?"